#BBCtrending: 'Female' lies take Twitter by storm

The hashtag #LiesToldByFemales has topped the trending charts in America - and caused the backlash you might expect.

"The topic is... #LiesToldByFemales Lets go!" posted an American on Tuesday night. And so it began. Two hours later it had been used over 6,000 times, and within a day the topic had mushroomed - generating another 100,000 tweets including spin-offs and rival topics.

Men flooded the network with gripes about their partners. Women claiming not to be annoyed - while secretly simmering with rage - seemed to be one of the chief complaints. " 'Im not mad...' What that really means is 'Im gonna kill you in your sleep' " said a user calling himself "I Play SNES in HD". Many accompanied the hashtag with the phrase "I'm fine". Predictably, the tag was accompanied by a slew of misogynistic comments, and a number of users tried to push back against tweets they thought were abusive. Amanda Marcotte tweeted negative comments about the trend, and told the BBC: "In my experience anyone who uses the word 'female' where 'woman' would work much better is probably going to say something vile and sexist. Both men and women tell lies because it's not a gendered thing to do, but a human thing to do. Why single out 'females' for it?"

A 2010 study suggested that men are actually more likely to lie than women. In a poll of 3,000 people, researchers found that British men lie three times each day on average, whereas women only lie twice. But the same report found that people were twice as likely to lie to their mothers than their partners.